Dr. Lee Smith, colleague and friend, passed away on December 25, 2025 in the Dallas, Texas area.

Lee was born near Dallas and raised her two daughters there, with her husband Vernon, a former Navy boy. Lee’s early career began as a licensed cosmetician with her own shop, where she first used her well-respected listening skills with her clientele.

In the early 1970’s Lee moved to secretarial work with the IRS, and later Sun Oil, where she eventually became Human Resources Director of Professional Development. While at Sun Oil her life-long passion for continued personal and professional learning sent her back to
school. She started with an undergraduate degree in Business, then a Masters in Education and Counseling and finally a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Psychology – of course Summa Cum Laude! For ten years after completing her formal studies Lee maintained a management consultancy in Dallas.

When introduced to the unfolding field of executive coaching in 1995, Lee transitioned
wholeheartedly working as an executive coach for the next 30 years. She obtained one of
the first international certifications as Master Certified Coach (MCC), from the
International Coach Federation (ICF). In addition to coaching, mostly at the “C-Level” in
organizations and with individuals, Lee also did considerable writing, teaching, training and
lecturing in leadership development.

In 1998 Smith co-founded, with Dr. Jeannine Sandstrom, CoachWorks® International Inc.
an executive coaching firm that took them around the world. Smith and Sandstrom
believed that professional coaches need a leadership model to coach around, so they co
developed Legacy Leadership®, a timeless and highly adaptable business and personal
leadership model. This model includes a framework of practices, behaviors, attitudes and
values that address every aspect of successful leadership. Using this model, Lee traveled
the world, training coaching skills and coaching with executive global leaders.

Lee was also co-author of the coach training body of work including The Coaching Clinic©,
The Personal Coaching Styles Inventory©, and Professional Foundations for Masterful
Coaches©. For decades now this work has reached thousands nationally and globally. Two
published books – What’s Next: Women Discovering Their Dreams in the Prime of Life with
Rena Pederson (2001) and Legacy Leadership: The Leader’s Guide to Lasting Greatness
with Dr. Jeannine Sandstrom (2008; 2017) continue to be used internationally.

Regardless of the perspective taken regarding macro-coaching strategies, certain micro-coaching tactics can be engaged regardless of the coaching strategy being deployed. There are “coach-ful” interludes in any session when specific micro-coaching processes can be introduced that help to move the coaching session forward. These interludes hold the potential of introducing small interventions that can have a major impact. These micro-coaching tools are based on the basic assumption that small things and small changes often should be the focus of a coaching session. As Paul Watzlawick (1986, p. 92) concluded many years ago: “the great lies dormant in the small; therefore we should respect and protect the small.” As Watzlawick notes, the big “ultra-solutions” often backfire and allow for no minor corrections. They tend to be win-loss (this solution is correct and other solutions are wrong). Small solutions tend to be correctable and allow for collaboration and a win-win pathway to the use of and testing of multiple small solutions.

Furthermore, these small things and small changes are best introduced in an Interlude (a small space and short time of safety). The Interlude should be filled with small things that generate insights and small changes that can serve as a fulcrum for much bigger changes. Finally, the interlude should be designed to enhance, for a moment, something called second-order learning and something called second-order change. It is in micro-coaching interludes that our clients can glimpse something quite different from what they currently think is “reality” and glimpse a quite different way of being in the world.

At this point, a cautionary note is in order. While it is of great value to set up small steps that can be easily modified, it is also essential to have an overall strategy in mind, alongside desired outcomes (that can be adjusted over time); otherwise, there is the potential of “incrementalism” (Michael1973) to gain traction, leading to what is often called “mission creep.” Small steps are taken that gradually lead an institution in the wrong direction or leave it “wandering in the wilderness.” It becomes “safer” for the leaders of an organization or government to supply the day-to-day tactics, without ever addressing the bigger strategic issues. Tragically, we saw incrementalism in full operation during the Vietnam War. As documented by David Halberstam (1993), small decisions kept being made by the White House that led to gradual expansion into a full-scale and extended war. There is reason to believe that something similar has been occurring over the past decade or two regarding American foreign policy, particularly as related to the defense or invasion of other countries.

The landscape of professional and executive coaching has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis since its emergence in the late 20th century; I have witnessed many of these changes in my 26+ years of coaching. What began as a performance-oriented practice borrowed from sports – essentially “business athletics” focused on winning the corporate game – has evolved into something far more nuanced and, dare I say, more human. Today’s most innovative coaches are abandoning the fiction that we can separate our professional selves from our bodies, our environment, and our ancestral wisdom. They are embracing somatic awareness, partnering with nature as co-coach, and humbly learning from ancient traditions that have guided human development for millennia. These aren’t just trendy additions to make coaching feel more “woo-woo” (though that accusation certainly gets thrown around). They represent a fundamental recognition that we have been trying to solve multidimensional problems with one-dimensional tools.

The Traditional Foundation: When Coaching Wore a Suit and Tie

Professional coaching as we know it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, born in the fluorescent-lit conference rooms of corporate America. Early executive coaching was essentially business consulting’s younger, more emotionally available sibling. It drew heavily from organizational psychology, performance management, and just enough sports psychology to make executives feel like corporate athletes. The focus was laser-sharp: achieve specific goals, improve metrics, climb ladders (corporate ones, not actual ladders; that would come later with nature-based coaching).

I will admit there is something almost quaint now about those early days when coaches believed that a good SMART goal and an accountability structure could solve most problems. We wielded our 360-degree feedback assessments like sacred texts, our Myers-Briggs types like astrological signs for the business world. “Oh, you are an INTJ? That explains everything!” We created action plans with the optimistic certainty of someone who has never tried to change a deeply ingrained pattern.

Yet, let’s be honest – this traditional approach worked. Sort of. It helped countless professionals navigate transitions, develop skills, and achieve tangible results. The International Coaching Federation, founded in 1995, brought legitimacy and standards to what could have remained the Wild West of professional development. We learned to ask powerful questions instead of giving advice (mostly), to hold space instead of filling it with our own agenda (usually), and to believe in our clients’ potential even when they couldn’t see it themselves.

If adulthood does not explicitly require joy for execution of tasks and advancement, perhaps we can explore the notion of leaving our ‘adult selves,’ or our analytical and efficiency-driven mindset, to the side. For just a few minutes, instead of interpreting from the ‘doing’ mind that many operate from most of the time, can you connect with ‘being’? While engaging with this article I invite you to consider the idea of cultivating more joy from a place of curiosity and play, rather than judging your own perceived lack of joy.

What is joy?

The etymology of the word ‘joy’ comes from the latin ‘gaudium’ meaning ‘rejoice.’ Therefore, joy is a celebration of life. There is liberation in asking: How can I celebrate my life? Wherever I am, exactly as I am, in this very moment?

Our inability to access joy is largely due to mindset. Approaching joy from a place of curiosity and introspection may reveal the very thing you need to accept that is blocking you from your joy. Consider:

• What does experiencing joy mean to me?
• Am I committed to embracing more joy in my life?

Joy is a choice. Are you willing to give yourself permission to add joy to your experience?

Joy can be seen as a current that connects us to childhood. Filling our lives with joy is a gift we give to ourselves. The things that bring us joy and curiosity are our greatest clues to the person we can become, if only we are brave enough to let ourselves experience happiness.

We often think of happiness as an endured state of being we are constantly pursuing. But we may consider it out of reach and achievement is difficult to quantify. This leads us to perpetually ask ourselves: Am I happy? Will I be happy? How can I be happier? We think that ‘once I am this, or have that thing, then I’ll be happy.’

These are loaded, heavy questions that are accompanied by guilt and judgment as we aim to define our own identity. But if we shift our attention to cultivating joy, there is a lightness that follows. How can I add more joy to my life? It doesn’t seem as daunting. Joy is attainable. Joy is one action, maybe once a day, or once a week, instead of an enduring pursuit.

Cultivating Presence

Above all else, joy is accessible to anyone. It is inherent in us as human beings.

Renowned meditation teacher and clinical psychologist, Tara Brach, shares that joy can be found through presence. It is important to find the space to be present with yourself and think critically about your intention around joy. If you are committed to increasing your joy, what is currently blocking more joy from filling your life? Perhaps you are missing opportunities for joy that are already there. Consider this: maybe you love to drink coffee. You have a cup every morning, but it has become a part of your routine, just something you do as you start the day. You are not experiencing the joy that the process of making and drinking coffee once gave you. Or your mind is preoccupied with other events of the day, and you are not present with yourself and your experience to notice how much drinking coffee brings you joy. You are missing out on joy potential.

Tools to shift clients’ mindset into a broader sense of curiosity and play can be used to uncover their innate sense of joy.

Seeing the Possibility

Bringing clients to a sense of excitement and expansion when they envision their future will allow them to fill their lives with joy. At the beginning of a coaching relationship, I have clients imagine how good their life could possibly be, if they were to achieve what they really want. I invite the client to imagine a grounded, sensory image of the future. Inviting this sense of expansion, vision, and possibility allows clients to see where they can add and cultivate joy as they imagine a greater future through our work together. Creating a vision map of all the beautiful things they want to create for themselves, will instill a sense of joy into the conversation, the coaching container, and their implementation of their vision for the future. This shifts the focus of the work from problem to possibility.

I have based the concepts I offer in this essay on an interview I conducted with Julio Olalla (Olalla and Bergquist, 2008), a renowned coach and philosopher, as well as work I did several years ago with Kristin Teresa Eggen, my Norwegian colleague, and Simon Selvakumar, my colleague from Singapore. I propose that there are two different perspectives regarding the nature of being and, more basically, the nature of reality which have been challenged by behavioral economists: objectivism and constructivism. Furthermore, each of these perspectives breaks down into two subgroups. I will introduce all four of these frameworks and consider how each one relates to the new field of behavioral economics. In keeping with the theme of this set of essays, I will also consider the implications of these perspectives for those engaged in professional coaching as related to matter of economics and psychology.

Static Objectivism

Advocates for the objectivist perspective assume that there is a reality out there that we can know and articulate. There are universal truths or at least universal principles that can be applied to the improvement of the human condition, resolution of human conflicts, restoration of human rights, or even construction of a global order and community. Donald Schön (1983) suggests that this perspective emerges from and remains closely associated with a tradition that he calls “technical rationality.” We might also refer to this perspective as it applied to the domain of economics. Technical economics would be based on the assumption that money is real and that rational processes can be engaged when dealing with the reality of money. Underlying this perspective would be a set of assumptions regarding the identity and “worth” of money. It is the American dollar that would determine the identity and worth of money. All other financial currencies and items of economic worth would be assessed on the basis of the “almighty US dollar.”

One of these revolutions is more cerebral in nature. It concerns the recent interweaving of economics and psychology. Called behavioral economics, this emerging interdisciplinary field introduces new perspectives regarding the way in which we, homo sapiens, make decisions, solve problems, and basically frame and interpret the world in which we live.

I have prepared a series of essays that build on the implications for professional coaching of these behavioral economic principles, and specifically the way in which we anticipate and interpret our near future. In this first essay, I lay the foundation for this series by considering the shifting economic nature of the society in which we live and, more basically, the shifting way in which we view reality.

Coaching Challenge I: The Shifting Nature of Economics

During the 1990s, I wrote a book in which I described the premodern, modern, and postmodern societies that exist side-by-side in the late 20th Century.  (Bergquist, 1993). These three societies still exist in the mid-21st Century and contribute to the VUCA-Plus conditions in which we find ourselves.  Specifically, the economics of valuing and exchange operate quite differently in premodern, modern, and postmodern societies. The primary commodities to be exchanged in a premodern world are those shared via bartering (e.g., sewing is exchanged for tilling of soil or building a chair) or extracted from renewable resources (e.g., meat, grains, fish, timber) and some non-renewable resources (e.g., minerals).

By contrast, the commodities exchanged in the modern world center on manufactured products and formal services being provided for pay (e.g., housekeeping, accounting, or medical treatment). Once we enter the contemporary postmodern world, we find that information and technology become valued commodities. While money is the primary vehicle for exchange in the modern world, new forms (such as credit cards and Bitcoin) are being used to facilitate postmodern exchange. The informal exchange of products and services in a premodern world is no longer to be “trusted.” Premodern handshake agreements are replaced by formal, legally documented agreements in the modern world. Our preferred way to ensure compliance with postmodern agreements is still in limbo, with reliance, at times, on the old premodern notion of credibility and reputation.

This Coda contains a summary of specific insights and implications I have presented in the four essays as they relate to the field of professional coaching. The list includes coaching insights and implications contained in the first two essays on the psychology of anticipation (essay one) and anticipatory differences to be found among the nine different personality types of the Enneagram (essay two).  Additions to this list come from the third essay on the behavioral and cognitive functions of the polystatic process, and the fourth essay on the emotional functions and neurobiological factors related to Polystasis and the psychology of anticipation.

Essays I and II

From the first two essays on the psychology of anticipation, I extract the following Insights and Implications for use by Professional Coaches. Making use of these insights and implications, we can assist a client in addressing their anticipations:

Perfect Storm and Valence

An effective professional coach will assist their client in identifying the assumptions made and the heuristics applied under specific conditions of anticipation. Many conditions in mid-21st-century life hold the potential of threat. It is in these conditions and at these moments that our client must be particularly vigilant and reflective. We encourage our client to ask themselves: Is this situation really like the last one? Can I do a better job this time in coping with this challenging situation? I might have to consider differing points of view. Is this genuinely threatening, or am I imagining that it is threatening?

A perfect physiological storm takes place when our coaching client anticipates a threat. Adrenaline is coursing through their veins and sustaining their sympathetic state of arousal. Yet, our client often does nothing about draining off this energizing system. They remain in a sympathetic state. Their polystatic process is messed up, with sustained energizing of a body that remains immobile. Our client continues to anticipate the lion. This being the case, they continue to activate their body in preparation for a fight with or flight from the lion. They even reset their polystatic baseline. The dial is now set on the survival mode—as are their psychosocial and somatic templates. As Peter Sterling has noted, it isn’t our client’s body that is at fault. It is just doing, appropriately, what their imagination is telling them is the “reality” to which they must respond.

We have similarly found that human being normally do not seek return to a state of homeostasis. Rather, as Peter Sterling (2020) has recently proposed, we are constantly shifting the baseline of our desired physiological state based on the changing environment we encounter from moment to moment. I have proposed that Sterling’s model of Allostasis can be extended to a model of what I have labeled Polystasis. The polystatic process concerns the shifting way in which we establish a desired psychosocial baseline as we interact with a social environment that is constantly shifting. The polystatic process enables us to constantly adjust our motivation, attention and behavior based on a dynamic

In this set of essays, I have offered yet another way in which human motivation, attention and behavior can be viewed. I have suggested that we operate not in the current state of our environment; rather, we are operating in the environment we anticipate will be present several moments in the future. We live in our near future as vital, competence seeking beings who are constantly adjusting their desired psychosocial baseline in anticipation of an always emerging environment.

I turn first to Emotions and then to the closely related matter of neurobiology and self-organizing systems as they impact the polystatic process of anticipation. Our emotions constitute the element in the “polystatic” process that provides most of the energy and some of the information needed to engage this dynamic, adaptive psychic process.

Having considered some of the operations involved in applying Emotions to the polystatic process of appraisal, adjustment, and action, I turn to the agency of the human psyche that is most closely associated with our Emotions. This agency is our neurobiological system, with its many levels of functioning, and a surprising lack of any central coordinating unit. As a self-organizing, highly adaptive system, our brain and its many adjunct parts provide ample resources for our successful engagement in a complex, feedback-based process of Polystasis (contrasting with the traditional model of homeostasis).

Essay Three concerns the ways in which, as a coach, we can influence the cognition and behavior related to the polystatic-based anticipation process. Before turning to the domains of behavior and cognition, I wish to provide a summary of the polystatic process that I more fully described in the first essay.

Polystasis

Recently, Peter Sterling (2020) offered a radical revisioning of the way our body operates. He proposed that we live in a world of allostasis rather than homeostasis. Allostasis refers to an organism’s capacity to anticipate upcoming environmental changes and demands. This anticipation leads to adjustment of the body’s energy use based on these changes and these demands. Allostasis shifts one’s attention away from a homeostatic maintenance of rigid internal set-points to the brain’s ability and role in interpreting environmental meaning and anticipating environmental stress.

In the first essay in this series, I introduced an expansion on Sterling’s Allostatic model, which I labeled Polystasis. I created this word to designate multiple functions engaged by complex human systems in addressing the issue of stasis. As Peter Sterling has noted, it is not simply a matter of returning to an established baseline of functioning (stasis) when considering how actions get planned and taken in a human system.

As Peter Sterling proposed, the static notion of Homeostasis is inaccurate. A dynamic model of Allostasis (at the bodily level) and Polystasis (at the psychosocial level) is required, especially in our mid-21st-century world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence, and contradiction (VUCA-Plus) (Bergquist, 2025).

Related in some ways to the perspective offered by Hawkins and Blakeslee (2004), who focused on the function of prediction in the operation of human intelligence, the polystatic process is embedded in the critical operation of anticipating the near future. While Hawkins and Blakeslee proposed that prediction requires the creation of a guiding map stored in memory, our polystatic model relies on the preparation of templates that guide both the emotional and cognitive elements of the anticipation process. As I noted in the first essay, we human beings (and perhaps all sentient animals) are living not in the present but in the near future.

There are many different models of personality types. Each of these comes with differing anticipations based on the specific personality (or character) being considered. I will illustrate how anticipatory psychology can be applied to personality types by focusing on one of the oldest and most respected models—this being the Enneagram. Our enneagram type leads us to differing anticipations. I offer a set of brief suggestions about the nine anticipations (both positive and negative) of the Enneagram (based on Helen Palmer’s version of the Enneagram). At the extreme, each Enneagram type anticipates a large amount of something (positive) or the complete lack of this something (negative). What this something is differs for each type.

Enneagram One: The Perfectionist

Helen Palmer offers the following summary description of the background and current perspective and behavior of someone with a strong Enneagram One orientation (Palmer, 1991, p. 72):

“Ones were good little girls and boys. They learned to behave properly, to take on responsibility, and, most of all, to be correct in the eyes of others. They remember being painfully criticized, and as a result they learned to monitor themselves severely in order to avoid making mistakes that would come other people’s attention. They quite naturally assume that everyone shares their desire for self-betterment and are often disappointed by what they see as a lapse of moral character in others. The Perfectionist outlook is encapsulated in the image of Puritan ancestors. They were hard working, righteous, fiercely independent, and convinced that plain thinking and goodness would prevail over the shadow side of human nature.”

If we explore the anticipatory reactions of Enneagram Ones, we find both positive and negative reactions. On the positive side, there is the prospect of living in an orderly world, or more immediately, the prospect of finding a room one is about to enter as being tidy or a relationship in which one is about to enter being highly predictable and constrained by social conventions or formal role. The Enneagram One is likely “light up” (a drop of dopamine in their bloodstream) when anticipating that the people with whom they are about to interact are responsible and to be trusted—they have “moral character.” The “light up” is also likely to occur when anticipating that a highly structured, rule-based (even legal) system is available for interactions with another person.